How to Get Started With WordPress Development

Though learning WordPress development might appear to be difficult, however, it offers numerous benefits for the developers.

It is important, to understand, the major components of WordPress.

They are – the core, the themes, and the plugins. The Core refers to the common programming languages such as PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

It involves the default functionality of WordPress Content Management System such as backend of the website, checking the password strength, scheduling posts, creating users account and many more.

The themes, on the other hand, are involved in the front-end of a site.

They help in determining how various posts and pages on a website will be displayed to the audience.

One can either choose the pre-built themes or can opt for custom-design.

The Plugins provide additional functionality to the WordPress site.

They might make changes to the backend or the frontend of a website.

The development areas of WordPress

The different areas of WordPress development are discussed below

Developing Core Software

Numerous volunteers are involved in the development of WordPress.

For developing core software, one needs to acquire certain technical skills concerning knowledge of programming languages such as PHP, HTML, CSS, and others.

However, initially, they can start with the identification of bugs, and verifying them.

Once a bug is identified, the developers can attach the code to remove it.

After it is being reviewed and properly checked, the codes might be used.

This is one of the best ways for developers to involve in core development.

Themes Development

To create a website, developers need to gain knowledge of developing themes.

As a result, most developers started their learning process with theme development.

Whether one needs to customize a theme or create a new theme, this is an interesting development area to start with.

It involves all the core development languages, and the developers can also view the code of other themes and learn how they work together.

This will also help them to venture into businesses involving the sale of themes.

Plugins Development

Plugins are an important aspect of WordPress development.

They can transform any types of websites including social media platforms and many others with the click of a button.

They provide the developers an absolute control over different aspects of WordPress and allow them to make any changes they prefer or require.

Therefore, it could be understood, that it should not be attempted by those who have just started with coding in WordPress, as too many things can go wrong with a plugin that is badly written.

Developers who have prior experience in languages such as PHP and who are eager to solve problems while working on WordPress might opt to follow this area of development.

Some popular plugins of WordPress are associated with social networks, security, page building and many more.

WordPress also contains a free Plugin Directory that includes almost more than 40,000 plugins.

Checkout SKT Themes Plugins as well.

Rest API

Once, the developers have mastered other important areas of development in WordPress, they are introduced to Rest API.

However, if they have a proper grasp over other programming languages such as Java, they might be able to use it theoretically.

This is a comparatively new area and allows the developers to create applications such as iPhone or Android apps and others on WordPress.

The function of Rest API includes connecting to their website where they can check their latest five posts, delete or create users, and many others.

Knowledge of important tools involved in the development of WordPress

The process of learning for developers continues throughout their professional life.

To be able to work on Wordpress Development, the developers are required to get acquainted with various tools.

At the initial stage, the minimum requirement is to have fluency over programming languages such as PHP, HTML, and CSS.

However, additionally, developers might want to gain knowledge of JavaScript and MySQL.

The more languages a developer learns, the more it will be easy for them to carry out different work involved in their profession.

PHP

Hypertext Preprocessor or PHP is a widely used scripting language on which WordPress is built on.

Therefore, the developers need to have a thorough knowledge regarding the same.

It will also help them to understand the workings of programming, and they can use the knowledge to solve various problems both on and offline.

Being a server-side language, PHP is processed on the server initially.

One can take help of tutorial of W3Schools for PHP.

HTML and CSS

The knowledge of HTML and CSS is essential for WordPress development.

Irrespective of the language the developers use or the codes they write, it all comes down to HTML while sending web pages to the user and some CSS that styled those pages.
HTML is involved in structuring a website which involves the things to be put on the header, footer, sidebars, headings, and others.

On a deeper sense, HTML is used for optimizing a website on search engines for which it is vital to get the correct syntax.

Additionally, CSS is used for determining the style on the structure which includes the color of the links, text, borders, alignment of images, the thickness of the border, space between paragraphs and many other elements of websites.

Similar to PHP, W3Schools offer tutorials on HTML and CSS.

JavaScript

It is a client-side programming language used to create dynamic and interactive website pages.

A web develop with knowledge of JavaScript can cause various webs applications strong and scalable.

Additionally, many WordPress themes and plugins are created using JavaScript extensively.

This language also comes with WordPress in the form of JavaScript libraries such as Backbone.js, jQuery, and others.

Therefore, the knowledge of this language will help the developers in customizing and applying them in a better way for WordPress development.

One can get tutorial assistance of this language on W3Schools.

MySQL

MySQL is an open-source database server developed on Relational Database Management System or RDBMS.

It is capable of dealing with large database connection.

Though writing raw MySQL code on WordPress is rare, however, an understanding of how this language works will help in writing codes better.

This language is used for accessing as well as working on data in a database.

WordPress relies on it for retrieving its data, though as developers, one would not require to use this language.

The reason behind this is WordPress has a set of helper functions for this purpose.

However, in some events, one may need to write their query involving database or one may need to optimize certain aspects in their website.

For this reason, basic knowledge in MySQL can turn out to be helpful.
One needs a lot of practice to get better on programming languages.

While tutorial can help developers in learning the codes for the same, it is likely, that they would face difficulties in the initial stage, however, this gets better with time.

Advanced Tools

Once the web developers gain expertise on essential programming languages such as PHP, HTML, and CSS, they can move on to advanced tools involved in WordPress development.

LESS and SASS codes

The first category involved as a part of learning these tools is LESS and SASS preprocessors.

They are supersets of CSS which implies that the codes that are valid for CSS are also valid for LESS and SASS.

The advantage of using these languages is that they can use variables, functions and other elements in CSS.

Build Tools

Some of the build tools considered to be best are Gulp and Grunt.

They monitor files for changes and once the requirements are met, they run various tasks.

For instance, if a change is made to a SASS file, the developers can compile it to CSS and save it to a particular file.

These tools are very effective for optimizing images, downloading external packages, concatenating files and many others.

Command Line

While using a command line may appear troublesome, using them can save a lot of time.

With the help of a simple script and WP-CLI tool, one can install WordPress including themes and plugins within few second.

On the other hand, the same work, if one opts to carry out manually, will involve huge effort and time.

Version Control

It is also one of the useful tools for WordPress development.

Though it was designed to work on the same codes in teams, however, it can also be used for managing bugs, projects and developing backups at the same time.

Some of the popular Version Control tools are SVN and Git.

Learning Source

While it is clear, that developers need various technical skills in terms of learning programming language along with the understanding of the use of various tools for developing WordPress, the often might wonder regarding the proper and reliable learning sources.

In this matter following sources are of great help

• The WordPress Codex
• Various tutorials
• Forums of developers

Therefore, from the above discussion one can understand how one can develop WordPress with the help of various languages and useful tools and the areas of development involved.